Bounded biharmonic weights project page
Alec Jacobson
May 04, 2011
My colleagues, Ilya Baran, Jovan Popović, Olga Sorkine, and I have just submitted the camera ready version of paper "Bounded Biharmonic Weights for Real-Time Deformation" to be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2011. I've put up a bounded biharmonic weights project page where you can find the preprint version of the article, videos and more to come.
Bounded biharmonic weights are featured in the official SIGGRAPH 2011 Technical Papers Advance Preview. The Technical Papers Chair, Hugues Hoppe, writes:
"An elegant UI framework that unifies cages, skeletons, and point constraints for 2D and 3D deformations."
Abstract
Object deformation with linear blending dominates practical use as the fastest approach for transforming raster images, vector graphics, geometric models and animated characters. Unfortunately, linear blending schemes for skeletons or cages are not always easy to use because they may require manual weight painting or modeling closed polyhedral envelopes around objects. Our goal is to make the design and control of deformations simpler by allowing the user to work freely with the most convenient combination of handle types. We develop linear blending weights that produce smooth and intuitive deformations for points, bones and cages of arbitrary topology. Our weights, called bounded biharmonic weights, minimize the Laplacian energy subject to bound constraints. Doing so spreads the influences of the controls in a shape-aware and localized manner, even for objects with complex and concave boundaries. The variational weight optimization also makes it possible to customize the weights so that they preserve the shape of specified essential object features. We demonstrate successful use of our blending weights for real-time deformation of 2D and 3D shapes.
Update: I have released a 2D matlab demo, with complete source code.